I know this has no defined rhyme scheme… At first, every single line was going to rhyme with the very first line, but it ended up being too forced. Then it was going to be every 7 lines would rhyme with each other (a,a,a,a,a,a,a b,b,b,b,b,b,b), but that ended up wrong. Then the first 7 rhymes, then the next 3, then 3, then 1 that was of no match to any line. It’s sort of chaotic after that… but that’s the point. As the emotion rises, the rhymes break. Then there’s the 7 time rhyme again and 2 lines to recap the beginning.

This poem is about Human Trafficking… a crime I was involved in as a child. A crime a lot of people don’t want to fight against because they have been tricked into believing it isn’t what it is. Human Trafficking is not prostitution. The term prostitution implies that there is a choice… even if that choice is “do I want to work today or lose my house?” It isn’t human smuggling, either. Victims are, more often than anything else, not trying to get into a country illegally.
Trafficking is slavery. In every way you were taught about in school. There are still slave auctions in America, and everyone is a potential victim.

I am and was a middle class girl half-white half-Inuit Indian. My captors were my father, his brother, and others I don’t know.

Most victims know their captors. They’re tricked. Boys can be easier because they won’t see it coming. Girls who travel in packs think there is safety in those numbers… but that’s not always the case. Often times, you’re just more targets to choose from and if you run, they’ll get the stragglers. Victims range from the ages of four (4) to fifty (50). Sometimes older and sometimes younger…newborns, just hours old, have been bought and sold in the sex trade; used and killed on their first day of life.

There is hope, though. There is a way to protect yourself and those you care about! We have a forum set up to teach about Trafficking in a way that is not strictly text and horrible stories that just make people feel sad. We do it in an uplifting way meant to prevent trafficking from happening, rather than simply speak about the victims already caught. Our goal is to prevent more victims from being caught, and to teach current victims ways to escape, because there are ways they simply do not know about!

I didn’t escape till I was 13. I wrote poetry about what was happening at my father’s house because I was afraid to openly talk about it. I thought my mother would be mad and abandon me, that the world would hate me for it… it seems so stupid now, but I honestly believed my father and the victims of this crime suffer the same fate!
The link to the forum is in my journal here, at the very top on the side. Please visit and join! You can share your short stories, get information on trafficking, and we greatly encourage you to, once you get the knowledge, write short poems about trafficking and post them here with an endnote instructing people to visit the forum! By spreading the word this way, we will save lives!